I’m reading Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God, based on the parable of the lost son/elder brother and I came across this one section that I think succinctly captures the contrast between the two ways of living and a radical third way to live: by the gospel.
Jesus does not divide the world into the moral “good guys” and the immoral “bad guys.” He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast.
This means that Jesus’s message, which is “the gospel,” is a completely different spirituality. The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles – it is something else altogether.
The gospel is distinct from the other two approaches: In its view, everyone is wrong, everyone is loved, and everyone is called to recognize this and change.1
1 Tim Keller, The Prodigal God, 44-45, bold mine.
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